Of course the article is about the archaeological discovery, but if you're curious (as I was) what the poem is, it's "Caedmon’s Hymn":<p>"Now we must praise the protector of the heavenly kingdom
the might of the measurer and his mind’s purpose,
the work of the father of glory, as he for each of his wonders,
the eternal Lord, established a beginning.
He shaped first for the sons of the earth
heaven as a roof, the holy maker;
then the middle-world, mankind’s guardian,
the eternal Lord, made afterwards,
solid ground for men, the almighty Lord."<p>via <a href="https://imagejournal.org/article/caedmons-hymn-the-first-english-poet" rel="nofollow">https://imagejournal.org/article/caedmons-hymn-the-first-eng...</a>
Thanks, came to the comments for this!<p>Reading Old English as a Scandinavian is always interesting, because if you squint hard enough, you can easily see how the languages are so deeply related. So many modern Scandinavian words have what seem to be lost cognates in Old English, and I suppose vice versa.<p>That said, I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words and the grammatical structure of the poem, even if it would make for a much more awkward text. For example, this text translates "middangeard" as "middle-world", which is correct, but it is cognate with "Midgård", which is the Norse mythological name for Earth. (In Scandinavian translations of J.R.R. Tolkien, "Middle Earth" is translated as "Midgård".) I think this lets us understand more about how writers of Old English understood the world, and how it was connected to the broader mythological landscape in North/Western Europe around this time, how Christian and Pagan belief systems were interacting through language as the region was in the process of christianization.
Yes, but J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a guide on this (after seeing a couple of really bad quality translations) which later translations benefited from:<p><a href="https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Guide_to_the_Names_in_The_Lord_of_the_Rings" rel="nofollow">https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Guide_to_the_Names_in_The_Lo...</a><p>that this was in _A Tolkien Compass_ which was one of the first books I purchased w/ my own money (along w/ _A Tolkien Reader_) is arguably a big part of why I chose to study languages early on in my life.
As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go back far enough (not even prehistoric 'far enough') in each case (even the languages which are geographically distant currently). But then, of course, civilisation happened.
Yes. There is a reason why a family of languages is known as Indo-European.<p>For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.
My father in law is a Persian speaker. I was very surprised to learn that thank you (mersi) is the same as in French, and OK/indeed (baleh) is the same as in Spanish.
Persian <i>mersi</i> is actually a direct borrowing from the French [1]. Not sure about the other one, but I guess it’s just a coincidence, as happens so often in language [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Persian" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Pers...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://zompist.com/chance.htm" rel="nofollow">https://zompist.com/chance.htm</a>
Spanish vale and English value have the same Latin origin. Persian bale is an Arabic loanword.
Arigato in Japanese is said to be a borrowing from Portuguese Obrigado (might want to verify that!).
Japanese is fascinating to me as a language freak for the enormous amount of borrowing. As an English speaker, as long as you can decode katakana (easy to learn) you can probably walk around the streets of Tokyo and read half the signs.
Even more interesting is when words are borrowed back!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborrowing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborrowing</a><p>For example, katsu from cutlet, is borrowed back into English to mean… cutlet.<p>And when combined with “curry” as in “katsu curry” the journey meanders all the way through Tamil, Portuguese, Japanese and English, following sailors where they went.
No, it's documented, as is <i>tempura</i>. It's like pancakes: you make them before the time of fasting. "The Time of X" in Spanish is "tempora X" and I would bet Portuguese is similar.<p>There are loads.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Port...</a>
It's listed there under False cognates.<p>> evidence indicates arigatō has a purely Japanese origin<p>I remain suspicious, though. Maybe what happened was the popularization of an existing Japanese term under the influence of Portuguese Jesuits, since it sounded similar to <i>obrigado?</i>
Perfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.
Gura mie eu.
Brother! I hope you have have also studied a bit of Latin and Greek, to see the great similarities, and paths like that of "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge".<p>It is a very great thing that so many peoples now speak languages with clear common roots buried behind the deviations of use; and outmost interesting to recognize the plan and the deep thought in those radixes.
The Lithuanian Swadesh list includes the following words and I was able to find numerous relatives to Gaelic. I could be wrong about some. Obvious similarities to Latin in some cases too, maybe loanwords. But one can see the Indo-European connections.<p>Lithuanian and Celtic had no direct contact with each other AFAIK, although Celtic was in contact with Vasconic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic... And Lithuanian was in contact with Slavic and Germanic, maybe Finno-Ugric...<p>Obviously numbers...<p>Sniegas - Sneachd — Snow<p>In — An(n) — In<p>Najas — Nuadh — New<p>Marios — Muir (genitive mara) — Sea<p>Srūti (to flow) — Sruth (stream)<p>Mirti (to die) — Murt/mort (murder)<p>klausytis (to hear) – cluas (ear), cluinntinn (listen)<p>sekla — sìol — seed<p>Senas — Sean — Old<p>Vyras - Fear (plural Fir)- Man (wer(e))<p>Dantas (tooth) - Deudag (toothache)<p>Ugnis (fire) — Aigeann (fireplace)<p>Raudonas — Ruadh — Red<p>Dienas (day) — Di- (day in day names) – Day<p>Pilnas — Làn — Full<p>Kaire — Ceàrr — Left<p>Dešinė — Deas — Right
It's all about Proto-Indoeuropean. You can get tons of words from Latin and Sanskrit and compare them.
I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless.<p>It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to devise a language that would unify historic language origins roots in a contemporary time. The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects that are all under varying states and types of endangerment or extinction risk, but also prevent an ignoble, unstable, and inadequate language like contemporary English from dominating the whole world.
> The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects<p>How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?
I’m sure you are aware of Esperanto.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto</a>
You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.
I preferred Interlingua...<p>But these days, Slovio would help me more.<p>I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise.<p><a href="https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/</a><p><a href="https://www.slovio.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.slovio.com/</a>
I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange.<p>Straight from the Slovio website:<p>>Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla.<p>>Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand<p>I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.
There was a UK TV show years ago that I've always remembered where the presenter tried to buy a cow using Old English with a Frisian speaking farmer in Holland:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34</a>
You'd probably enjoy "The Story of English" series:<p><a href="https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36&si=Kw3JUDhM9Euomnr5" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36&si=Kw3J...</a><p>or "The History of English" series:<p><a href="https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV50II2XzmY-9GLZWAuieOp27mZUQfKnj&si=MxDVgrm_ML8_LU48" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV50II2XzmY-9GLZWAuieOp27...</a><p>In the second series, there is a weather report in Frisian that vaguely sounds like English.
'The presenter' here being Eddie Izzard :)
> I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words<p>This is how the Icelandic sagas were translated into English in the nineteenth century. Translators then almost always chose the English cognate of the Old Norse world, even if that English cognate was obsolete or its meaning had changed. Far from helping immerse readers in the medieval world, the effect (at least for modern sensibilities) is offputting and goofy, and in the twentieth century publishers like Penguin replaced those translations by new ones with a very different approach. More judicious use of the Germanic lexicon in English, à la Tolkien, provides a more appealing atmosphere of olden times.
Out of curiosity, what are the other two realms? (I assume it’s two)
In Norse mythology "the nine realms" encompass the entire world - but there's no definive list of what realms constitute the nine.<p>In the center, humans inhabit Midtgård. The gods in Valhall and the Jotun in Jotunheim.<p>Then there's also Helheim or Hel - for the dead, Alfheim for the elves, Svartalfheim for the dwarves...<p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Locations_in_Norse_mythology" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Locations_in_Nor...</a>
There's actually nine:<p>- Vanaheim, home of the Vanir, a group of gods associated with fertility.<p>- Asgård, home of the Aesir, the big-name gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.).<p>- Jötunheim, home of the Giants.<p>- Alfheim, home of the elves.<p>- Helheim, the underworld ("Hell").<p>- Svartalfheim / Nidavellir, home of the dwarves.<p>- Midgård, home of the humans.<p>- Muspelheim, home of fire elementals.<p>- Niflheim, world of mists.<p>(This is the commonly accepted list, but it's always worth mentioning that surviving literary sources of Norse mythology are very scarce. Much of the lore was reconstructed in the 19th century.)
> - Asgård, home of the Aesir, the big-name gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.).<p>Freyja, along with her brother Freyr and their father, Njörðr, is one of the Vanir.
English is claimed as being influenced heavily by every nation that conquered England, because of course it was: Latin via the Romans; Anglo-Saxon/Gemanic; then Viking; and, then the Latin/Romance influence again via France/Normandy.<p>And of course, English develops organically (unlike, say, French), allowing new words to emerge, and for old words to take on new meanings. I love it.<p>As an Englishman, I always find it interesting that there is this weird defined notion of "Englishness" in language, culture, whatever, when our entire history is one of mashing and remixing ideas over at least 2,000 years, and recent discoveries at Stonehenge push that back potentially by 3,000-5,000 years more.<p>I particularly like the irony of the far-right going on about English identity on a march in London before going to have a lager and chicken tikka masala before heading home to a bungalow and putting on their pyjamas... :)<p>I think the Scandinavian roots you talk about trace back to common Germanic roots perhaps, but also the Viking aspect will influence a lot. I think English has been "dipped into" by those roots a few times in history, as has Latin.<p>On the need to keep the etymology aligned in translation: I think this is a routine challenge of the translator's skill, and why so many people have different views of different translations of the same texts.<p>The Bible could easily be translated in many different ways, but the "King James" version is considered the standard within the Anglican churches in the UK (and seems to be the common root for US church bibles too), but a more modern translation would be possible, as would one that has a closer etymological meaning to the original sources.<p>It's all interpretative. If people are building entire belief systems and ways of life (and arguably, laws for society), around a translation, and getting it off in a few places, it's likely we're going to run into the same problems even more when translating Tolkien or an ancient poem...
>the "King James" version is considered the standard within the Anglican churches in the UK<p>I don't find this to be true. Even at high mass ('bells & smells' type communion) you get more modern versions. To my recollection NIV would be most common. Obviously not a representative survey. Also, it might be at traditional/formal services you get [N]KJV as I've been to less of those.<p>Amongst very old people you see strong support for KJV because that's what they learnt 70 years ago. It sounds very archaic to modern ears. I'd say KJV hasn't been favoured this side of the millennium.<p>Just my impression.
A bit of correction: the version you'll most likely see being used across the Church of England nowadays is NRSV. It's the scholarly translation.<p>NIV is the preferred translation for the low-church side, the evangelicals, so definitely won't be used by the bells-and-smells high church crowd. KJV is preferred by a niche who also prefers the Book of Common Prayer liturgy over Common Worship. Usually this is either an older population, a certain ethnic subgroup with calcified traditions, or old-school low church folks (so not modern evangelicals) who prefer the old ways and even the Thirty-Nine Articles.
> I particularly like the irony of the far-right going on about English identity on a march in London before going to have a lager and chicken tikka masala before heading home to a bungalow and putting on their pyjamas... :)<p>Stewart Lee had a good bit about this:<p>> [..] > ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’<p>Racism always tends towards the silly, of course, but British ethnic nationalism particularly so, given the history. What’s ’British’, anyway?
Yeah, I share your fascination.<p>My understanding is that Old English vocabulary mostly predates Viking invasion, but even then the colonizers would have a large shared vocabulary with (non-Celtic) British natives, who would be the descendants of Anglo-Saxon settlers a couple of centuries earlier.
The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island.<p>Latin influences English as a learned tongue, used by clerics and academics. Other than that most of it comes via French, when the Normans brought it.
> The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island.<p>Recent research, namely an article by Lars Nooij & Peter Schrijver [0], suggests that a population speaking Latin/Romance may have remained present in Britain until the late first millennium. Granted, the effect of this local Latin would have been on Welsh more than English.<p>[0] <a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110776492-004" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110776492-004</a>
Well you had the Norman invasion; acquired lots of Norman French words yet fought the French several times over the centuries. One thing doesn’t have to do much with the other.
This was archival research, not archaeology though. This book was located in an archive, and it's mostly in Latin with the Old English content being quite incidental, which explains why it was not noticed until now.
The article has a link to the poem under the text [Caedmon’s Hymn] (unsurprisingly).
This is the text in Old English for anyone looking: <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-56d227a3b602f" rel="nofollow">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5...</a><p>Actually, here is the full text with the modern English inserted:<p><pre><code> Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
eternal Lord. He established a beginning.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
He first shaped for men's sons
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
then middle-earth mankind's guardian,
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
eternal Lord, afterwards prepared
firum foldu frea allmehtig
the earth for men, the Lord almighty.</code></pre>
Knowing both Norwegian and Dutch, most words here is surprisingly similar to modern words:<p>hefenricæs = himmelrikes (no)<p>uerc = werk (nl)<p>eci = evig (no) / eeuwig (nl)<p>ærist = eerst (nl)<p>barnum = barn (no)<p>sceppend = schepper (nl)<p>EDIT: Hearing the poem read also gives dutch / germanic vibes: <a href="https://gutenberg.org/files/19677/ogg/19677.ogg" rel="nofollow">https://gutenberg.org/files/19677/ogg/19677.ogg</a>
Oh, what? Is "eci" (eternal?) the origin of "Ecki Thump" - Yorkshire version of OMG?
And indeed the ancient and mysterious Lancashire martial art, of course.<p><a href="https://www.goodiesruleok.com/articles.php?id=17" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodiesruleok.com/articles.php?id=17</a>
Oh my god is that where Icky Thump comes from
Public Domain audio:<p><a href="https://librivox.org/caedmons-hymn/" rel="nofollow">https://librivox.org/caedmons-hymn/</a><p>The text is read in the Early West Saxon dialect.
Same version found here (incl. OGG Vorbis format):<p><a href="https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/19677" rel="nofollow">https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/19677</a><p><pre><code> Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmehtig
</code></pre>
"Caedmon's Hymn"
My degree is in Celtic Studies. This kind of discovery may be surprising to those not versed in it but not those who have studied these languages. Some of the best preserved Old Irish, for instance, is in St. Gallen in what is now Austria and Milan.<p>There is still an entire Medieval European world out there in the archives still waiting to be discovered. Sadly, there are not many of us who have the skills to do this and we are not paid very well or often not at all.
Here's the old English poem! <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-56d227a3b602f" rel="nofollow">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5...</a> Should be in the public domain by now eh?<p><pre><code> Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmehtig
</code></pre>
I couldn't make hide nor hair of it without the translation, but with the translation I see quite a few more words than just "and his" that have stayed around:<p><pre><code> hefen: heaven
uerc: work
uard: guard/ward
hrofæ: roof
æfter: after
middingard: Earth, to Marvel
allmehtig: almighty</code></pre>
I think also there's barnum = bairn's (as in children), and foldu = fold (as in sheepfold). Or just <i>field,</i> same thing.
Despite what The Poetry Foundation claims, and despite the Modern English translation by one of their own, the Early West Saxon text is Public Domain.<p>Although The Poetry Foundation still promises to track all your content<p>The OP article, published by Trinity College Dublin, and the original, and the photograph, are expressly CC-BY-ND 4.0. This is not a "free license", but it is a Creative Commons License.<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-lost-copy-of-the-earliest-surviving-english-poem-in-a-medieval-manuscript-in-rome-281086" rel="nofollow">https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-lost-copy-of-the-earl...</a>
It looks to me like Poetry Foundation did it right. The modern translation has a copyright notice, the Early West Saxon version has none. I was being a little coy as anything older than Mickey Mouse is fair game. It's not a particularly marginal call, if you know what I mean
1,3k years ago is such a weird way to write it. Makes sense if we are talking millions of years, but why not write "in 700" or just "1300 years ago"
The title is from the HN user, the actual post uses 1,300 everywhere.<p>So you can write it down to tech brainrot.
Probably a German or French speaker forgetting that , is never a valid decimal separator in English.
it was 1.3e-6 billion years ago!
Century would be plenty. And having Rome mentioned with some weird negative number leads to first thought being English in Roman era? How does this deduct...
Yeah, I felt the same. Especially since 1300 uses the same numbers of characters as 1.3k
Probably they mean to convey significant digits, though I feel it's safe to assume people would read "1300" as an approximation, not pointing to the year 726. I found it odd too.<p>Edit: "The newly-discovered manuscript in the National Central Library of Rome of Caedmon’s Hymn dates from between the years 800 and 830, making it the third oldest surviving text of the poem." So... 1.2k then?
The manuscript is ~1200 years old, but the poem was composed earlier. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, includes it and the story of its composition in his <i>Ecclesiastical History of the English People:</i> according to that story, it was composed while Saint Hilda was abbess of Whitby, c.660-680.
Another commentator mentions that the poem may have been published 1200 years ago, but authored much earlier.
I absolutely love post-Roman, pre-Norman British writing because it's so rare it gives the era a sense of mystery. This is of course the time when King Arthur is supposed to have lived. In the absence of contemporary records, the impulse to fill it with wizards and dragons is understandable.
For those interested in learning old English, I’ve been going through Oswald Bera by Colin Gorrie -<p><a href="https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/" rel="nofollow">https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/</a><p>Basically it’s a full blown story/graded reader with no modern English apart from vocabulary. You build an understanding of the language as you read the book and what is initially gibberish becomes quite clear as you progress . It does help if you’ve had a lot of exposure to German ( vocab and grammar), or barring this any case inflected language.<p>What’s noticeable is that it’s about 200 pages long, so the story gets quite sophisticated , and rather unexpectedly the book is a bit of a page-turner !
It's absolutely amazing to me that we're still discovering things that are held by major libraries. This wasn't discovered in a limestone tomb, accidentally preserved. It wasn't in the basement of some hoary building that was once the personal library of the Medici.<p>This was in a <i>modern</i> library that was built recently (1975), by historical standards. This book would have been, at minimum, catalogued, packed, and unpacked to verify it made the trip. It was't missing. It wasn't unearthed. It was just never <i>read</i>.<p><a href="https://www.cenl.org/library/the-central-national-library-of-rome/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cenl.org/library/the-central-national-library-of...</a>
Here is the translation from the article. Which is slightly different from what is listed below in the comments.<p>Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,
the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,
the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,
eternal Lord. He established a beginning.
He first shaped for men's sons
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;
then middle-earth mankind's guardian,
eternal Lord, afterwards prepared
the earth for men, the Lord almighty.
I wonder if it starts "There once was a man from Londinium..."<p>- I'll get my coat...
It really baffles (and amazes) me that Old English is practically unintelligible to modern day English speakers.
If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same.<p>The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech.<p>School website: <a href="https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/" rel="nofollow">https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/</a><p>Better pics can be found easily.<p>It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible.<p>English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Celtic. Every few centuries you go back, you strip away whole layers of additional vocabulary left by the descendants of successive invasions.
That's because we're fed the massively oversimplified idea that English was one language, spoken all over the UK, and developing in a single straight line from Old English, to Middle English, to modern English.<p>It's obvious that today's connected society - leading to any single language being very widespread for mutual intelligibility - bears no resemblance to the way things were many centuries ago. But we're conditioned to think in terms of our own experience until we <i>really</i> think about it or have it pointed out. Back then, the UK was split into many different dialects, largely consolidated later by the use of the printing press. Those dialects had so much difference in some ways, that snippets of them could sound like related-but-different languages.<p>(And there's very little relative difference between modern English and "middle English", which is easy for us to read, notwithstanding differences in the not-yet-standardised spelling.)<p>And most importantly, across history, the literary language has always been the language of the elites, the ruling class, which is often not the same language spoken by the plebs. Since the language they spoke is therefore missing from the historical record, it's sometimes open to interpretation and guesswork. Many historical linguists try to make it known that middle-to-modern English can't have come directly from the dialect of Anglo-Saxon we now call Old English, but overturning (or even clarifying) dogma from the early days of any field, against years of written encyclopedias, is very difficult.
Article could benefit from some editing: the poem is from variously the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries! After reading a few times I get that one date is the supposed composition date, the second is the publication date of Beade, and the last is the date of transcription for the copy in Rome.
I bet it starts "Roses are red, violets are blue..."
[flagged]